Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Hardware acceleration

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In computing, hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on a more general-purpose CPU. Examples of hardware acceleration include blitting acceleration functionality in graphics processing units (GPUs) and regular expression hardware acceleration for spam control in the server industry.

Traditionally, processors were sequential (instructions are executed one by one), and are designed to run general purpose algorithms controlled by instruction fetch (for example moving temporary results to and from a register file). Hardware accelerators improve the execution of a specific algorithm by allowing greater concurrency, having specific data-paths for its temporaries, and possibly reducing the overhead of instruction control. Modern processors are multi-core and often feature parallel SIMD units; however hardware acceleration still yields benefits.

Hardware acceleration is suitable for any repetitive, intensive key algorithm. Depending upon granularity, hardware acceleration can vary from a small functional unit, to a large functional block (like motion estimation in MPEG-2).

The hardware that performs the acceleration, when in a separate unit from the CPU, is referred to as a hardware accelerator, or often more specifically as a 3D accelerator, cryptographic accelerator, etc.

In the hierarchy of general-purpose processors such as CPUs, more specialized processors such as GPUs, fixed-function implemented on FPGAs, and fixed-function implemented on ASICs; there is a tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency, with efficiency increasing by orders of magnitude when any given application is implemented higher up that hierarchy.

Examples

  • Graphics processing unit
  • cryptographic accelerator
  • Video processing unit
  • AI accelerator
  • References

    Hardware acceleration Wikipedia